I have seen this on a site before and I never understood why. Whats the point of limiting the length of the password? Its not to save storage space since the plain text isnt stored and the hash should be a uniform length. So whats the advantage?

So you’re just going to call me out like that, huh?

Thanks for the list, that is very helpful. The main feature I’m looking for is heart rate monitoring. Both during a workout and also being able to see a graph of my heart rate after so I can track it over time. A sleep tracker would be nice too but a lot of wearables are not comfortable to wear during sleep for me so I probably wouldn’t use it anyways.

Thanks for the detailed answer and pointing me towards the Mr. Chromebox tooling. I picked up the used Acer CB3 for $30 and was able to install the custom UEFI firmware and then install Gallium OS without too much hassle. Like you said, not a fancy machine, but hard to beat that price.

Does Android really even use the Linux Kernel anymore? I thought they forked it about 15 years ago and at this point it has diverged so much its not even really the Linux kernel anymore.

I’ve had a great experience with Mobian. It’s been a while since I distro-hopped for mobile OS’s but Mobian seems to be the most stable for me.

Not having apps like Uber/Lyft is a problem for a lot of people. I’ve ran into issues like going to events (concerts/sporting events) where they expect you to download their app to even get in the door, which is more of a societal problem then a technical one for me. I know some apps can be emulated on Linux phones but I havent played with it much so I’m not sure how well they work.

I’ve used gnome maps with very degrees of success. Its obviously not on the level of google maps, but getting better.

I fell in love with Gnome 3 when it first came out and havent looked back. I dont miss a taskbar because I just use the keyboard shortcuts to move between workspaces and alt+tab to switch programs. Gnome seems to be more efficient the less you use the mouse which is my preferred M.O. anyways.

I started daily driving a PinePhone with Mobian over two years ago, upgraded to a PinePhonePro when they first came out, and then I finally got my Librem5 about a month ago. They have come a long way. The core functions you’d expect from a phone work; calls, texts (SMS and MMS), camera (pictures and video), email, web browsing, all that works perfectly fine on my Librem5. However, I understand they are not for everyone. While there are things like twitter and mastodon clients for Linux you are not going to get a banking app for a Linux phone (for example). I just use the browser for those kinds of things though.

Back in college my CS 201 class was on C programing and needed to use the Linux machines in the lab for the class. They were running CentOS. That was my first time using Linux. After that I starting playing around with different distros (Ubuntu and Debian mostly). Then I took a “system administration” class that was really “Linux 101” that was taught by the departments sys-admin who is a Linux Evangelist and they showed me the light. Havent owned a windows or Mac machine since (about 20 years ago now)

Very true and I always combine them when I dont need to, using cat file.txt | grep foo instead of just grep foo file.txt